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Sample Blog Descriptionen-usOrcs and Six-Shootershttp://ideabyre.com/gaming/orcs-and-six-shooters
Imagine that a posse of armed fighters, with few connections to society, travel around a sparsely-settled wilderness. They ride into town as vigilantes, have a drink at the tavern, and dispatch some wrong-doers. They are generally men of violence, and take on missions for reward and fame. They battle barbarian monsters outside of town, and care most of all for their own skill and freedom. We could be at the O.K. corral, or any knock-off of the Shire, couldn’t we? Just swap the revolvers for sw...
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games,fantasy,world-building,genrehttp://ideabyre.com/gaming/orcs-and-six-shootersMon, 03 Apr 2017 12:48:00 -0400A Taxonomy of Adventure Puzzleshttp://ideabyre.com/gaming/a-taxonomy-of-adventure-puzzles
In a basic sense, puzzles in adventure games are very simple: you have discrete objects, with different stats. By combining the right objects, or perhaps taking the right action type, you can advance through a chain of causality; eventually unlocking the final "win" state of the game.

I find it useful to see this bare abstraction that lies underneath everything; but obviously it's also so abstract that it's hardly helpful when really sitting down to craft puzzles. So let's describe them some...

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games,adventure,puzzleshttp://ideabyre.com/gaming/a-taxonomy-of-adventure-puzzlesSun, 02 Apr 2017 20:44:37 -0400How Adventure Games Came Backhttp://ideabyre.com/gaming/pixel_adventure_difficulty
There is a big resurgence in adventure games, especially form indie developers, many emulating classic tech, with big pixels. It's amazing, and a boon for adventure lovers like me, who grew up with text adventures. But what enabled this? Easy indie development for one, and the technology for nicer palettes and voice acting, which the originals couldn't do. But I think the biggest reason is difficulty.

Adventure games went away, a strong argument goes, because they became too arcane; too diffi...

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games,adventurehttp://ideabyre.com/gaming/pixel_adventure_difficultySat, 01 Apr 2017 20:53:00 -0400Small Numbers in Tabletop Game Mechanicshttp://ideabyre.com/gaming/granularity-and-game-mechanics
In a computer game you can have numerical variables that span any range, that are even non-linear, and otherwise very complex. But in a tabletop game, the players have to do the math themselves (or consult tables) and must track everything too. Tracking if variable states is especially tough with miniatures, or anything with many units. The burden of tracking leads most strategy game designs to go granular: reducing the spread of variables to a very small range. But this creates other ramificati...
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math,scaling,gaming,mechanicshttp://ideabyre.com/gaming/granularity-and-game-mechanicsSun, 15 Jan 2017 13:50:00 -0500Review of Banner Saga: Warbandshttp://ideabyre.com/gaming/review-banner-saga-warbands
Here I give my thoughts on The Banner Saga: Warbands, a cooperative board game by Megacon Games, in association with Stoic and Versus Evil.

Where I'm Coming From

I'm a long-time board-gamer and also a huge fan of the Banner Saga video games (as of now that's BS 1 and 2 in the trilogy, plus Factions, the multiplayer battle game).

I also tend to think strategy games should be about strategy, and coherent with strategy alone--I'll play RPGs for role-playing, etcetera. I'm also not an enemy...

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reviewhttp://ideabyre.com/gaming/review-banner-saga-warbandsSun, 08 Jan 2017 17:54:00 -0500Modular Prototyping in Tabletop Gameshttp://ideabyre.com/gaming/module-prototyping-tabletop-games
We can design a game from theory first: start with a premise, decide on major goals, and then design systems and mechancis that will function, while meeting all the goals, and still adhering to the premise.

One trouble is drift. Goals tend to accrete, making the project more elaborate. We fall in love with certain mechanics, interactions, or side-effects of an in-process design, and so add them in to the "must have" list, constraining all further design work.

Another trouble is that our pre...

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games,designhttp://ideabyre.com/gaming/module-prototyping-tabletop-gamesThu, 15 Dec 2016 19:53:00 -0500Focused Game Designshttp://ideabyre.com/gaming/focused-game-designs
For a game to be about a certain idea or topic, it must focus on that idea. Focus can be created in a few ways. One is through detail: with charts, tables, die-types, modifiers, etcetera, you can cause more time and thought to be centered on one aspect of the game. (It is easy to unintentionally focus to much on the wrong things, by adding too much detail to them.)

But detail isn't enough for a truly central idea. Games are, after all, about decision-making as well. And focus is given to some...

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models,gaminghttp://ideabyre.com/gaming/focused-game-designsFri, 19 Aug 2016 14:45:00 -0400Remixing Tactical RPG Roleshttp://ideabyre.com/gaming/role_remix
In tactical fantasy RPGs, characters can be sorted into major roles like tank, healer, etcetera. Most of these specialize in one tactical pursuit during combat, like ranged damage; a few blend more than one pursuit, such as the off-tank support role; and in particular, magic users often employ several tactically-distinct types of magic -- mixing up those types will be the focus of this piece.

Let us list the major combat pursuits, magical and otherwise:

Tanking (blocking, damage absorption...

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models,gaminghttp://ideabyre.com/gaming/role_remixTue, 08 Mar 2016 00:00:00 -0500On RPG-Strategy Hybridshttp://ideabyre.com/gaming/rpg-strategy_hybrids
There is an interesting possibility of designing tabletop games that are tru hybrids of the RPG and strategy genres. But to do so, we must appreciate the kinds of rules such games use, so we can see how to carefully combine them.

1.

In pen-and-paper or tabletop games, there are two sorts of actions for the players: using a formal rule, and making some other kind of judgment. The games themselves feature those mechanical rules, and possibly meta type guidance about when and when not to use e...

Tabletop games can often only handle a narrow range of physical (or other) scales, but for some concepts, widely varying scales are relevant. WEG's old Star Wars d6 used different scales -- so people, speeders, and ships could all come into play -- using one method we'll look at.

There are four broad approaches we could take.

I. Linear Scale

This is normally what's used in games, and provides poorly for different scales. The numeric values (like damage capability, say) simply fall in a...